In recent years, individuals and businesses have begun using video-conferencing technologies to increase efficiency and productivity. In particular, video-conferencing technologies allow people at a first location to simultaneously converse with people at other locations in nearly real time, without wearing headsets or using handheld communication devices. Video conferencing can be as simple as a conversation between two people in different locations (point-to-point) or involve several locations (multi-point) with more than one person at each location. Video-conference communication is becoming more affordable to a wide range of users including individuals and businesses, because high-speed Internet connectivity has become more widely available at a reasonable cost, and because the hardware used for this technology has continued to improve in quality at ever lower costs.
However, many video-conferencing technology users argue that a number of issues prevent current video-conferencing technology from becoming a standard part of communication. One major issue is lack of eye contact, which plays a major role in conversational communications, perceived attention and intent, and other important aspects of natural face-to-face communication. For example, consider a first person and a second person participating in a video conference. When the first person looks at a display screen of the second person, the first person is not looking at the camera, resulting in the second person getting a view of the first person without eye contact. On the other hand, when the first person looks at the camera, the first person at best gets a peripheral view of the second person exhibited on the display. Thus, typical video-conferencing technologies are arguably worse than traditional audio conferencing technologies that provide no eye contact cues, because typical video-conferencing technologies create the false impression that participants are either avoiding eye contact or are distracted.
Designers and users of video-conference technologies continue to seek improvements to the video-conferencing experience.